A number of “efficiency” issues may perhaps impede the expansion of everyday life's dependence on mobile computing and mobile communications. The efficiency issues may be viewed as having both energy and management components. The energy component revolves around the fact that an end user's mobile devices (e.g., laptop/notebook computers, cell-phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), etc.) use a battery as the electrical power source. To the extent these devices may consume battery power at what the user regards as too high a rate, the end user's mobile experience will be cumbersome (because, in the end user's eye, the mobile devices need to be recharged too often); and, as a consequence, the growth of the end user's dependence on mobile computing and mobile communications may lag or not develop at all. Therefore, those approaches aimed at extending battery life have a better chance at delivering a clearly beneficial mobile experience to an end user.
The management component involves security and/or dealing with a multitude of different devices, services and corresponding service providers. As an example, consider a present day traveling professional. Often times, a traveling professional will carry a laptop/notebook computer, a cell phone and a PDA. The traveling professional has, to first order, a security concern in that any, all, or some combination of the aforementioned devices are apt to be used to transport sensitive and/or confidential information over a non secure network (such as any public network (e.g., the Internet, a wireless “hot spot”, etc.) or wide coverage wireless network); or, at least be accessible through a non secure network. Presently, in order to ensure that such information is secure, firewall and/or encryption/decryption functions are embedded into devices having access to a non secure network. Embedding sophisticated firewall and encryption/decryption software into each device (e.g., the laptop/notebook computer, a cell phone and a PDA as in the case of the traveling professional) having non-secure network access raises a few efficiency concerns.
Firstly, the IT personnel responsible for providing a secure environment will have a high burden as they will be responsible for the installation, maintenance, upgrading, etc. of security related software for multiple devices per employee. Handling the high burden either through additional IT personnel or through reduced turn-around-times amounts to inefficiency. Secondly, embedding security functions into each device raises the per unit cost of each device. Here, the higher cost may not only be the cost of the software itself; but also, the cost of a higher performance device hardware platform (because security functions tend to be sophisticated and therefore may require processing power beyond what would be needed without their implementation). Note that in this case a detrimental side effect on battery life is expected as higher processing power typically results in increased power consumption. Therefore, embedding security functions into various mobile devices may not only reveal management inefficiencies but also energy inefficiencies as well.
Lastly, there is management inefficiency in the sense that a myriad of different types of wireless services (e.g., GSM, CDMA, 802.11, Bluetooth, etc.) and service providers may be engaged by the traveling professional. Specifically, not only can the traveling professional use a different type of service and a different service provider for each of his/her wireless devices; but also, any single one of these devices may be capable of communicating with different service providers and/or over different wireless service types. The myriad of different service providers and network types expands the dimension of the billing records that need to be kept track of; which, in turn, corresponds to another type of inefficiency for wireless access.